TV Land has officially jumped into the cable sitcom party, even if they showed up just as the hangovers are starting to set in. And for their first venture, they have enlisted the help of some of television's tastiest babes.

Valerie Bertinelli (One Day at a Time), Jane Leeves (Frasier), Wendy Malick (Just Shoot Me) and Betty White (The Golden Girls) have been brought on board to star in Hot for Cleveland, the second sitcom project approved by the cable network. That's right, Betty White is a TV hottie. I will fight ANYONE who makes fun of me for it.

The other show commissioned by TV Land is Retired at 35, and has lined up actor George Segal, Christine Ebersole and SNL alum Casey Wilson, her first role since she was abruptly pumped from the sketch show. Given TV Land's horrible choices in making their own reality shows, do these even have a chance of being a hit?

You won't believe which show is kicking the collective ass of TV Land's The Cougar. Then again, maybe you will. The New York Times reports that reruns of (Shazam!) The Andy Griffith Show are the cable network's most watched show.

So does this mean that the former classic TV network will go back to running shows that people actually want to watch? Probably not. Sorry to break the bad news to you. Oh, and there is no Santa Claus, and if the tooth fairy does exist, she's probably a big ol' commie.

The marketing for this show has been relentless, and that's an understatement. It's easier to shake the SARS virus in a back alley chicken hut in downtown Hong Kong than it is to shake an ad for The Cougar.

One of my personal rules (number one is "thou who smelt it, dealt it") is the harder the advertising, the worse a show is bound to be. TV Land hasn't just aired a commercial for The Cougar every five seconds in between their few remaining watchable shows. They air it on other networks. They plaster ads all over the Internet. If the economy dips any lower, they'll probably start tattooing ads to people's foreheads.

Cable channels used to have fairly rigid formats that followed simple formulas. Nickelodeon was the network for kids. ESPN was the network for sports. USA was the network for non-stop reruns of Wings.

Now most of them have fallen into a strange gelatinous blob of unoriginal and unrecognizable sewage. I believe the technical term is "reality shows."

The TV Land network has been slowly engulfed by this blob of mediocrity with shows like High School Reunion and The Cougar. Their latest VP hire indicates it's about to be swallowed whole by more of the same.